Remember pre-election 2000 when Bush said that we shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor? He was of course joking (and not just about the balancing part), as Bob Herbert points out in his article — The Machete Budget.

Contrast the cuts in Medicaid that are in the latest budget with the $10m spent on a bahmitzvah party by a defense contractor who made $70m last year supplying apparently faulty flak-jackets to our troops. And they claim that there’s no war profiteering. Of course in WWII a real American hero, Harry Truman stopped that stuff dead in its tracks.